But in My Soul I Sing
by Raven Sinead
Summary: Love. It is worth everything. It is worth lives, it is worth sacrifice, it is worth enduring obstacles, surmounting them...understanding them. When Meridian Tabris takes Leliana in her arms, all is not as it seems, and some things cannot be reciprocated in their exact, tangible form. But all experiences are valuable. F!Tabris/Leliana. First Person POV. Story Complete


**Disclaimer: I own nothing. All characters belong to BioWare and EA.**

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**Leliana**

_Yes. Oh please. Yes. Now. Please, my darling, now. _

I watch as her eyes, luminous even in the black, moonless night, flash and flare beneath me. I savor and cherish the waves of heat emanating from her naked body, the frenetic, stilted rise and fall of her chest, the rush of blood flushing across her breasts.

Captivated, I lean down and take a nipple in my mouth, tasting its rough, pebbled texture, the salt of her sweat, the vicious tang of her desire as sweet, light moans pierce her barely parted lips, breathing syllables that might be my name, or supplications to a god I do not serve, nor even know. No matter how many times we have shared this, it enamors me every time. The red tips of her ears, the swollen, sweet curvature of her lips, the plunging of her hips as I move inside of her.

_I am yours, my Meridian, _my thoughts whisper as I give her the pleasure denied her in her former life before she was ripped from her home by the Grey Wardens, who tainted her blood, who turned her hands into nothing but a weapon to be used by an order whose history she was alien to.

"Fall, my darling." I whisper, encouraging her, playing her body as I play my lute, with nothing but absolute precision and skill, determined to love her with as much skill as I render a melody, soften a heart, and take a life.

It is passion in raw form, beauty personified, and I bite my lip as I feel her muscles fluttering beneath my fingers, clenching and unclenching in vivid rhapsody as a rush of heat pours across my hand, as her crimson, swollen lips part with a strangled cry, as her eyes call to their sisters, the very stars above.

_Meridian Tabris_, I caress her name in my thoughts as I cradle her against me, softening her fall from the heavens, _my only love. The voice who brought me out from exile and hell. I would but give you joy all of your days, and soften all your sorrows, and ease the ache of your wounds…_

Reverent, I kiss the star-shaped scars sprinkled across her chest, memories of the fateful day at the Tower of Ishal…the day she had nearly not survived. I tremble, thinking of what might have been had her fate not seen her survival, not seen her triumph over death and her feet lead to Lothering, to the tavern where I had waited, knowing my calling lay near.

"Leliana?" she asks in the rich, rough, elven accent of the Denerim alienage. "Are you well? You tremble."

"For love of you." I breathe against her ear, tracing its sharp point with my lips. "For want of you."

She rests her hand against my cheek and I turn my face into her touch, feeling the rough rises of her calluses from wielding twin daggers, the scratchy ridges and sworls of her fingertips from drawing a bow. I glory in her touch, often unskilled but never ungentle. For all of their hardness and imperfections, I do not fear them, for the hands that brought me greatest pain were soft and perfumed. Hers never are, and though they often feel like untanned leather and smell of blood and death, I cherish that, for they are her hands.

They came from nothing and showed me everything. They emerged from poverty, destitution, and death, and they found then personified caring, beauty, and strength. I had thought myself so strong once, until faced with her magificence. I had thought myself beautiful, long ago, until I looked upon her soulful black eyes, her dusky skin, her raven hair which lay strewn across my arm like an abstract painting. Quiet, untrusting, she had feared us, then accepted us, then given me a greater definition of faith than ever I had known. She had trusted me first with her life, then with her history, then with her heart.

_I will hold it always close_, I promise her, even though she does not ask, resting my hand across the slight rise of her left breast, splaying my fingers and absorbing her heartbeat.

"You are so warm." her breath brushes over my lips, tinged with the scent of wintergreen leaves. "So bright."

Her lips press fully to mine, conveying bliss to bliss, and I feel my thighs slick further with desire, longing for her touch, for that intimate connection I had, for years, denied myself out of fear. Meridian's hesitating trust, faltering questions, and at last, her faith in the redemption and thriving of all living things, had brought us to this point. We now lay together every night, skin upon skin, soul upon soul, some distant part always touching, but I delighted in nothing more than bringing her the height of physical pleasure, of flaying my soul before her and pouring into her body and mind every measure of devotion I could conjure.

Her lips, gentle, sweet, kiss along my jaw, down my neck, hints of teeth scraping over muscle and vein. I shudder beside her as shivers spill down my spine and through my legs. Slow, delicate, she shifts our positions until I am lying beneath her shorter height and smaller frame, admiring every curve and line of her elegant, lithe body. I reach up and trace her sharp cheekbones and the delicate bridge of her nose, her exquisitely rendered features that might have been carved by the most skillful sculptors of Orlais.

I see the light in her obsidian eyes brighten to a predator's gleam, but I am not frightened. I am comforted and warm, because I am _hers_ and because nothing before has ever been _hers_. I am cherished. I belong. I am not to be used and tossed away. I am to be uplifted and held and longed for.

Her lips descend to my breast, squandering no kisses, but a light layer of heated breath. I clench my fists and tremble beneath her as my nipples harden further, rising upward, begging for the heat of her mouth. Slow, deliberate, she closes her lips over the rigid flesh and I close my eyes, hoping that this time it will be different.

But as she pulls with her mouth and laves with her tongue, all I can feel is a hot coil of pain spiraling down through and deep into my stomach, turning the fluttering muscles there rigid with resistance. I bite back a growl of frustration, hating that the tip of her all too skilled tongue feels like the unpleasant burn of an recently extinguished wick.

She reads the tension in my body with a skill so peculiar to her and draws away, her brow furrowed in concern. I smile to comfort her and shake my head, pulling her closer to me, locking our lips in a kiss, distracting her so that her hands flutter down my sides in a remembered quest.

One dark, well muscled arm laces around me, under my back, pulling me against her as two fingers trace across my sex, coating themselves with my desire, seeking me out. They hover over my entrance and I breathe deeply, preparing myself as they push in. The pain is sharp, but unlike the other, it does not spread, and I have learned to feel and savor its razor edge of pleasantness.

My breath shudders out, but Meridian is so lovely, so naïve and yet so learned, that she takes it for nothing but what she feels at my touch, pleasure. Deliberate, she begins her rhythm, steady and pulsing, but all I can feel is a stinging prickle as she moves within me. I close my eyes, knowing that this is love, and that passion is its expression, and that soon…yes.

I exhale as the pain lessens and turns to a calm numbness. I open my eyes, feeling with my heart what I cannot with her body. In Meridian's eyes I see the night, the night that has held our secrets, that has held our tears, that has guarded our scars and our whispered confessions. I see our first conversation by firelight. I see our first kiss. I see the first time I took her by the hand and led her away from camp, out under the stars, where her people were meant to be, and made love to her, kneeling before her and worshiping her body and her beauty and her heart.

I see all of those things and let them pierce me, for I can feel nothing now, merely the night wind cooling the moisture on my thighs, and the dim sensation of something inside, filling me, a dim echo of what should exist. I know it is her touch, and I know that I should be feeling fire and that my body should tremble with want and that cries should be torn from my lips against my will…but I cannot give to her as she does to me. Because I cannot feel her as she feels me. I cannot be touched as I touch her.

I tighten my core around her, providing the illusion of response, the illusion of sensation, glorying as she smiles and curls her fingers upward, resting the callused pad of her thumb over the bundle of nerves that, when I touch her own, makes her writhe, curse, and cry my name out to the moon.

For the briefest of moments, as she caresses me within and without, I feel a whisper of what she must feel. It is exquisite, and tantalizing, and I stand on the edge she rises and falls over so easily, so willingly, so wonderfully. But, as it ever does, the pleasure turns to a shock of pain, then a burning ache that spreads from my core, through my muscles, across my bones. I cannot mask the hissed breath or the fleeting wince or the flinching of my body as she presses there again, as pain overtakes what should be strictly pleasure.

It is a mercy when Meridian slows, then ceases of her own volition, questioning the wild frenzy in my eyes and the sheen of sweat across my brow, the harsh breathing that I force to submit into even inhales and exhales.

"Have I done something wrong?" she asks, the same question she always asks when this happens, and always I give the same answer.

It should be simple to mislead her once more, to look into her eyes and say 'no, my darling' and endure the discomfort for her sake, so that she believes she can impart to me the same pleasure she thrills at. But tonight is something different, something new, for we have made good on the last of the Grey Warden's contracts and tomorrow shall go to Denerim, to fight for Ferelden in a place where Meridian and her people have no power and no sway. There, in the city where she was born, that was never home to her, she will need me. My support. My caring. My honesty. If I cannot give it to her now, I will forever damage the foundation of her heart's home within me.

"It is not you who have done anything wrong." I whisper, trusting the night and the stars and her eyes. "It is I who am damaged."

Guilt and contrition, two expressions I never wish to see cloud her expression, darken her countenance and, with obvious reluctance and regret, she withdraws from me, cleaning her hand on the blanket we rest on.

"I…I don't understand." she says at last, searching my eyes for something. Gentle, she reaches out and traces the soft, faded scar on my cheek.

Her hand moves, down my neck, across my back, feeling the scars left from the lash of the whips, the scouring of the brands, the stippling of the needles, the piercing of the hooks. In the deep night-sky-wells of her eyes I see hatred, hatred for the men who had defiled me in the way their same ilk had defiled her cousin.

"Is it…is it because of what was done to you that you feel no pleasure from my touch?" she asks, her lips trembling.

"No, my love." I assure her, knowing it to be true. "This I have…I will not say suffered…but this I have endured since first I acted on the body's desires."

"Why?" Meridian asked. "Is there a reason? Some injury, some spell? Or is it simply because none can satisfy your true desires…not even me?"

"Meridian." I chastise her, gentle, turning her face from the light of the moon and toward my own. "I lived a life of lies before I knew you, and knew many lovers in that life." I tell her that which she already knows, and does not judge me for. "I will lie no more, I have sworn that to you, and under the touch of those myriad lovers I felt pleasure only rarely."

"How rarely?" she asked, her elven distrust asserting itself in a darling flash of temper that warms me with its fire.

"More rarely than you." I tell the truth. "And no, my darling, I know of no injury, and no spell that was cast. To hear Lady Cecile tell it, I was born without breath, and they feared for my life. It is quite possible that permanent damage was done to my body and mind, damage no healer can undo, while the midwife fought for my life and beat fluid from my lungs. And, as you have seen, I have an unnatural resistance to pain as well, perhaps also an effect of this damage."

"I hate it." Meridian spits. "I hate that you can do such things for me and that I cannot return them to you. I hate that you suffer and flinch beneath my touch. I hate your bloody Maker for inflicting on you this…this curse."

I brush a lock of raven hair from her face and kiss her lips. "I do not." I tell her. "I cannot. Not now."

"How can you not?" Meridian wonders, aghast and nearly offended. "Do you not wish for…for what others have been given? Do you not feel any bitterness that your life, which has known such suffering already, should still languish while you are…you are happy, aren't you, Leliana?"

"I have joy beyond measure." I console her. "And no. I was bitter, for a time. Bitter when I loved Marjolaine, because though I showered her with affection, when she deigned to return it I felt nothing. But I am not bitter now. This curse and this gift enabled me to survive the dungeons of Val Royeaux. That which denies me pleasure also spared me pain. Because of that, I could escape. And that escape brought me here, to Ferelden, to the Chantry, and, my beautiful Meridian, it brought me to you."

Her eyes narrow as she weighs my words and examines my expressions. She has a gift for such things, having watched many a human from the shadows of elven ignominy, reading their expressions and the language of their body, so that she might know when to slip away, when to approach for something they needed, or when to dodge a blow. She has trained herself in the bardic arts, and I feel no anger as she uses that skill now, to ascertain the measure of my confessions.

"Then why do you…why do you let me touch you?" she asks, judging my confessions as truth, and needing to know more. "If it causes you discomfort, and gives you no release…why?"

Gentle, I rest my hands on her shoulders and draw her down onto the blanket, the lush waving grasses of Ferelden softer beneath it and us than the finest down mattress. I run my hand down her arm, take her hand in my own, and guide it between my legs once more, smiling as she fills me once again, puzzles making and unmaking themselves in her eyes.

"Because when you touch me," I whisper against her lips, closing my eyes, taking in her scent, trembling from her nearness, "my body oft times feels pain, and more often feels numbness and nothing…" she attempts to remove her hand and I clutch her wrist, stilling her movements, keeping her inside of me, cherishing our connection and our love, so much deeper than the physical, "…but in my soul I sing."

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_**Author's Note: **This is a prompt I received from fellow (and awesome) author, Drummerchick7 (seriously, check her stuff out). We got to talking about life and its intricacies, lack of realism in written and visual sex, and how everyone's experience is valuable and should be accessible...in some ways. So, because she delights in giving me difficult, grueling prompts (and because she's nosy), she asked me to write this one-shot. So, Drummerchick7, because you are awesome (and nosy), kind (and nosy), and all together an awesome human being (and nosy) this one is for you. I hope you all read and enjoy. It's not traditional smut, but it is based on real life experience, and hopefully that makes it worth the read. _

_Bright Blessings, _

_~Raven_


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